


Between Scylla and Charybdis

by Sangerin



Category: Firefly, Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Community: femslash06, Crossover, F/F, Femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-09
Updated: 2006-04-09
Packaged: 2017-10-04 03:08:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sangerin/pseuds/Sangerin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It doesn't matter who's sharing your foxhole as long as they shoot true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between Scylla and Charybdis

When you're in a foxhole, fire raining down on your head and no end in sight, you don't care who's in there with you as long as they can shoot true at the enemy. This new girl, Torres, she shoots true. Turned up last night from no one knows where, but grabbed a weapon and went where the sergeant told her. She hefted her rifle up over the edge and started firing. Hit four Alliance soldiers in her first few minutes and saw the bodies fly back with the impact. Sarge saw it, too, and nodded, saying 'Good job,' before he moved on. She kept shooting, reloaded, and shot again.

You kept going, and she kept going, for four hours. Held the Alliance off (for now), until finally there was a chance to lower your weapons and leave Tracey on watch while you and she joined the others to grab some rations. They'd been cooked up into a flavourless mess over a well-hidden flame, but they were hot, and she ate them with as much urgency and relish as anyone else. Sure sign that she'd been army for a while.

You're back on the line before you ask: Tracey's gone off to get his own meal and there's just the two of you, looking over what is, for now, a quiet valley.

'So, where were you before this?'

'The 506th,' she says. 'And before that – another battle.'

'That's the way we live our lives,' you say, but the regret on face, beneath her ridged forehead – you've only just noticed that – makes you think that the other battle meant more, somehow, than this one. 'That other battle?' you ask.

'A battle for independence, like this one,' she says. Her eyes scan the horizon. 'And I wasn't fighting for my own independence. I was fighting out of anger.' She pauses.  
'Anger and rejection can be great motivators.'

'So, you're not regular army?' you ask, surprised. She turns towards you, and you shrug before you explain. 'You fight like regular.'

'No,' she replies. 'I've just been in this business a long, long time.'

'So have I.'

She scans the horizon, following the line with her rifle. You look out, down into the valley. The lights flicker, but nothing from theirs is moving forward. Their bellies are full – more full than yours, you suspect. No one particularly wants to take ground tonight. Not that the commanders will take that into account.

So you stay on guard, each of you peering over the edge of the foxhole by turns. You chat with each other easily, foxhole chat about bad rations and bad officers and good non-coms. She asks about the sergeant and you tell her some, but not all that you know, because you don't tell tales behind his back. It's not that he'd object – he's an easy-going man. But your history with him goes back longer than it does with the woman by your side, and there's a thing called loyalty that you learn pretty quickly in this army. Loyalty to the cause if not to the brass, and to the people who deserve it. And he does. So when you've finished telling Torres about the how the sergeant got promoted from corporal in the middle of a battle, you turn the story back to her and ask her again about that other battle.

'I don't talk about it much,' she says. 'It was a different war to this. Less legitimate, maybe? We were resistance fighters, and I was little more than a mercenary.'

You've always assumed you had a good idea of your own history, and this woman is younger than you. But this is something you haven't heard about, or at least not that you recognise, and you say so.

'It was a long way from here. Nowhere you would know. The 'verse is too big to know every inch of it. I've learned that.'

'Planetary?' You're still curious.

'Sometimes,' she replies. 'But that all changed and I ended up here. Flash of white light: you know how it is.' She shrugs and you drop the subject, because everyone's entitled to a little privacy and because it doesn't matter who's sharing your foxhole as long as they shoot true.

Tracey comes back and tells you to take a break. He doesn't have the authority, but it gets tiring staring out at the lights of the enemy. You lean against the back wall and watch Torres and Tracey. You're close enough to join in the conversation with them, and you play a round of 'anywhere but here' until you decide that there's only so much of a battering you should let people's morale take. Tracey tries to flirt with Torres, and she slaps him down with two well chosen phrases, including a curse so ancient you have to think through the words to understand them. When Tracey turns away to hide his embarrassment, Torres looks over her shoulder at you and grins, and you grin back. Your mouth gets dry and you remember just how long you've been deployed out here. You stretch your neck one way and then the other. You roll your shoulders forward and back, and do one thing after another to distract yourself from the fact that suddenly you're looking at the curve of Torres' ass, noticing how firm it looks. You've always noticed a girl's ass first. With boys it's their shoulders. You like to know that you'll be able to hang on to something. This girl has a great ass. She turns her head, looks back at you again, and if it weren't for Tracey you'd jump up right now and hold onto that ass while you kiss her mouth and get her out of that jacket and the ragged shirt she's wearing beneath it. Right at this moment you don't care how much dirt you'd pick up rolling around in this dusty trench, and you don't care where it would end up.

You'd swear Torres knows what's going through your head, because her hips seem to swing a little more as she shifts her position. You have to drag your eyes away when the Sergeant turns up, and you'd swear there's a knowing gleam in his eye when he tells Tracey that he's being shifted down the line to cover a gap left by an injury.

'Have fun, ladies,' says Tracey as he gathers his things.

You snag Tracey's ankle as he leaps out of the trench. 'What have I told you about calling me a lady?'

Tracey just grins and shakes his ankle free.

'Does he ever shut up?' asks Torres.

'Not really,' you reply. Now you have to stand next to her, to take Tracey's place until the order comes to stand down for the night. You still have a soldier's awareness of where she is and what she's doing, but it's heightened, and distracting, and you curse Reynolds for taking Tracey instead of you. He's having his fun, you're sure, but it's not the soldier's way of doing things. What else can you expect from a volunteer with a sense of humour like his?

She's put a hand on your shoulder, and says softly, 'You're breathing kind of heavy,' but she doesn't ask whether anything is wrong.

'I get that way sometimes.'

She's smiling like a small child and her fingers drift lightly over the back of your neck as she takes her hand off your shoulder. Neither of you says much until the stand down order comes, and by the time it does you feel wound up tighter than you thought a human being could be.

'How many watch posts?' she asks.

'Enough. I was on last night. There's always someone within yelling distance.'

'I'm glad it's not us tonight,' she replies.

She's looking at you again, and now that you don't have to keep your eye on the skyline, you look back, and she pokes the tip of her tongue out and runs it over her lips, and that's all it takes. You lean across the space between you, which isn't a great distance in any case, and you press your dry dusty lips against hers, damp from her tongue, and she presses back against you, until you both tumble over onto the ground.

'You hair is going to get dusty,' says Torres. You've broken apart to try to sort out your tangled limbs, but your hands are on that ass you were looking at before, and you don't intend to let go of it for a long time yet.

'It already is dusty,' you reply. 'And I don't care.'

She grins, and pounces, and you end up with your back against the ground and her face looking down on you. She straddles you and you draw in your breath. She pushes her hands up your torso, beneath your clothes, skin against skin. She reaches your breasts, and her hands cup them and her fingers stroke and flick and tease. 'Keep your eyes open,' she whispers. 'I want you looking at me.' Her eyes are gleaming. Her hair is long and straggly: one long strand has escaped from the string she's tied it with.

She lowers herself onto you, and although she's small and looks light, she's all muscle and tension. She kisses you, sliding her tongue into your mouth and back again, then nipping at your lower lip until you gasp. She's no longer touching your breasts: you can feel her hands between your bodies, struggling with the fastenings of your trousers. She shifts on top of you to get better access, and you're embarrassed by how much you're squirming and shifting beneath her. You're embarrassed by how much you need this. But then she's whispering in your ear, foolish, needless words about the way you look and how glad she is that the sergeant sent Tracey away, and about what she wants to do to you and you to do to her, and it's only because she kisses you again at the very moment that her fingers start moving inside you that you don't scream and let the whole unit know what the two of you are doing. Not that they won't know tomorrow, from the glow in your face that you know you get, and the grin that will be plastered on Reynolds' smug face once he realises he was right. But you've got a beautiful woman pinning you down and her fingers are in places that no one but you has touched for months, and it means you barely care what will happen tomorrow, because all you want is for the kisses and caresses and that feeling of being filled to go on and on as long as it can. And it does keep going, until you're gasping for air and your heels are digging into the dirt and you and she are pushing against each other and holding onto each other like you're the last people left on this god-forsaken planet, and suddenly you're not sure you remember why you're protecting it anyway.

Then you roll over onto her, and although your instinct is to keep your weight off her, you remember that muscle and strength, coiled up tight in her perfect body, and you throw away the mental limits, ready to do all those things you were thinking about. Undoing her jacket and pushing up her shirt and her breasts are right there just waiting to be held and kissed and licked. She's still smiling at you and you remember what she was whispering in your ear and you do your very best to do every single thing she asked. Possibly you did a little too well: at this point the Alliance troops in the valley probably know what's going on.

You recover enough to put yourselves back together, to do up buttons and straps, to pick up the rifles from where they were dropped. But you're both tired, unused to the extra exertion. You settle down for the night, and your arm is around her, because you don't want this to end just yet. You feel the pressure where her body touches yours like a burn, and you know you're going to feel it for days.

You don't have time, here in the middle of a war, fighting for survival, to do anything stupid, but every time she takes a breath your stomach ties up in knots. She's holding onto her rifle, and you're holding yours. All you'd need to do would be shift slightly, and she'd be awake and on her feet. You've seen it before, and you know it's what you'd do too. The dawn is coming, because you can't exactly stop that from happening. You kiss her forehead, and wonder at the shape of it, and wish that things could stay this way for one more day, or one more hour. But there's no escaping the truth. You're soldiers, fighting a war, and there's no time for sentimentality.


End file.
